Symphony attracts new listeners by pairing visuals with music

The Omaha Symphony will accompany Shirley Jones, Julie Andrews and Yul Brynner this weekend.

The orchestra played for some deep-sea creatures last week.

And the group will accompany Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow” in “The Wizard of Oz” next season.

That may sound impossible, but it’s all part of the national trend toward orchestras employing multi-media events to lure new listeners. The Omaha Symphony combines live music and films or video, preserving vocals from screen actors while removing the musical soundtracks, resulting in the orchestra “accompanying” what’s on screen.

John Goberman of New York City created, produced and will narrate this weekend’s Rodgers and Hammerstein “At the Movies” program that features scenes from “Oklahoma,” “The King and I,” “South Pacific,” “Carousel,” “The Sound of Music” and “State Fair.” He said he’s a passionate believer in the multi-media concept for orchestras, as long as the music is the main event.

“This is not in an any way an attempt to decorate or distract from the music,” Goberman said. “This is not a screening of a film. This is a performance of a film, because you have the live energy of the hard-working musicians and conductor. Their energy infuses the audience experience so that it becomes remarkably exciting.”

The film scenes appear on a 32-by-18 foot screen above the 70-member symphony and Resident Conductor Ernest Richardson at the Holland Performing Arts Center. Performances of “At the Movies” are Friday through Sunday.

The multi-media concerts present challenges for the group, but Richardson says the musicians are up to it.

“The orchestra is tremendously flexible,” he said. “The fact that in any given seven-day period they can be playing an opera, a symphony, a children’s show (and) video shows, it shows the tremendous range that the orchestra is capable of.”

Richardson said preparation time is enormous for multi-media and visual performances. One of the technical tools he uses, called “click tracks,” gives him the rhythmic pace of the performance through synchronized clicks. The audible clicks help him stay in synch with the film projected on the screen and know where the orchestra needs to be musically. The system also allows him to take musical license within the performance.

“It’s a remarkable amount of work in part because it’s a different kind of work … so it’s more time-consuming,” Richardson said. “Each (performance) has a different technology that you are working with and you have to adapt to that as you go.”

So do the symphony staff and musicians.

Because of the technology involved, it can take support staffers as many as 12 weeks more time to stage multi-media programs than it does to produce MasterWorks concerts, the symphony’s standard classical music performances. For musicians, the work is about the same, though they must be agile and attentive. The conductor and his baton bear the responsibility for coordinating the music and the film. All the musicians have to do is watch him.

Ricardo “Rico” Amador, a 10-year Omaha Symphony violinist, enjoys the variety that comes with playing both classical and popular music.

“I have played in 30 different orchestras throughout my career and this is the most versatile orchestra I have played with,” Amador said. “We can play anything from Beethoven to the Beatles.”

The extra work involved in multi-media events pays off in new symphony devotees, everyone from children to first-time adult attendees.

Faith Morley of Omaha took her two young children to the symphony for the first time last weekend for the “Blue Planet” program, in which the symphony played the soundtrack to ocean scenes from the popular BBC/Discovery Channel series.

“We have always been big music lovers and we thought with the multi-media it was the best way to introduce them,” Morley said.

Richardson said he thinks kids will connect with this weekend’s concert as well, because many children are familiar with Rodgers and Hammerstein.

“It’s amazing to me how many kids actually are aware of these musicals. I fell in love with Shirley Jones three times when I was a kid … And then, of course, Julie Andrews.”

Richardson said the Omaha Symphony is always looking for ways to get into the fabric of the community – for good reason. A 2009 League of American Orchestras audience study said symphonies need to innovate to bring in more diverse and younger audiences.

“If recent (national) trends in classical music participation rates continue unaddressed, the audience for live classical music could decline by … 2.7 million people, or 14 percent, by 2018,” the study concluded.

“How does each orchestra connect to its particular community and what that community wants and needs,” Richardson asked. “You not only have to reflect the culture, but shape the culture.

“The language of music is such a vital thing to transfer to your children and to a community. Any performance that you take your child to is part of that process; they are getting the language in their ear . . . That’s what these concert experiences are like.”

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